Yesterday was my second father’s day and after spending a great day with Jenin and her mom, I decided to start publishing a new blog: Tuesday’s with Jenin.
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All in personal stories
Yesterday was my second father’s day and after spending a great day with Jenin and her mom, I decided to start publishing a new blog: Tuesday’s with Jenin.
It was from his father that Tamer had first learned of Alex Odeh. Tamer’s father, Mourid, kept newspaper clippings about Odeh in his office at the autoshop. They were the only images Mourid had, aside from photographs of Leila, Tamer’s mother, who had died shortly after Tamer was born.
Jamil stared at the blinking cursor, the blank virtual page on the computer screen, and wondered if he really hadn’t lived enough for the words to start coming automatically. Had anyone ever lived enough? Maybe it was a pointless question to ask oneself at twenty-two.
The cold reality is that Israel controls every aspect of Palestinian life inside the Palestinian territories. I hold a Palestinian ID, or hawiya, and a Palestinian passport, so on this trip, I felt some of the restrictions and hassles Palestinians deal with 24/7.
Breakfast, then work and school. Back home, then dinner: cheeses, labne, cucumbers, shai maʿ naʿ naʿ (tea with mint). Four years inched by. No sound but the gentle smacking of lips, the mechanical sips of shai. Dina used to watch the steam from the shai, the fumes from the cigarettes her father smoked at the table (as everywhere else) and imagine it was Jibran’s ghost. Maybe Jibran would slip in to their noses, their mouths, and shoot to their ear canals, stopping their ears translucently. Then everything would seem still. Jibran could keep carving invisible words in the empty air.
The Shalom Hartman Institute’s “Muslim Leadership Initiative” (MLI) has been submerged in controversy since it was launched in 2013. The program “invites North American Muslims to explore how Jews understand Judaism, Israel, and Jewish peoplehood” and include a visit to Palestine.
Over a homemade plate of babaghanoosh (smoked eggplant dip), your father asks you if you know just how much your jiddo—his father—loved batanjan (eggplant). You tear a piece of pita, dip and take a bite. You shake your head no.
Abderhman Abuhashem is a Gaza native who had big dreams and the tenacity to reach them.
A few days after the Israeli occupation of Gaza, we heard loudspeakers mounted on the cars announcing the lifting of the curfew for two hours: from 2 to 4 p.m. The sound of the war was still in my ears—the explosions, the low flying jets, the rattling machine guns.
My father’s voice echoed in my head as the plane descended into Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv. After 14 hours of being in the air, I was ecstatic to deplane and smell the fresh air.
“I am from there, I am from here, but I am neither there nor here. I have two names, which meet and part… I have two languages. I forget which of them I dream in.” Mahmoud Darwish wrote these lines in a tribute to Edward Said. Perhaps Edward Said would forget which language he dreamt in because it does not matter. All humans have dreams, and all in exile dream of home.
In the eighth episode of Zahra Haider’s Memoirs of a Stolen Land, “Connections as a Global Issue,” Omar Offendum talks about his art and activism and how it relate to Palestine. Offendum discusses the Palestinian conflict on how it has become a metaphor for other struggles around the world.
About a year ago I went on a humanitarian trip through Jordan. I visited Syrian refugees in various regions and camps. During my trip I was able to deliver some financial aide to refugees and bring donated items for children, such as toys.
The Palestinian Nakba or Catastrophe holds great importance in my life as a Palestinian-American, who was born and raised away from my true homeland.
The sounds of explosions shook the air around me. People ran frantically in my direction. Unfortunately this is what I was expecting on my trip to Jerusalem.
I don’t look like a traditional Arab—the one cultivated by the US media and Hollywood. You know, a woman with a unibrow hiding behind a full-faced veil.
Rehab sat on a beige sofa in her house, hands intertwined loosely in her lap on a fall Sunday afternoon. Her face appeared smooth with a slight cheekbone flush and her hair was pulled back from her neck in a simple bridal bun creating an ideal position to rest her mesh veil.